


Something That Wounds

by yuutsuhime



Series: Rose†Thorn [1]
Category: The Caligula Effect (Video Game)
Genre: Character Study, Coming Out, F/F, Female Protagonist (Caligula) is Named Hirano Luca, Gender Confusion, Gender Dysphoria, Grief/Mourning, Hopeful Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Kissing, Masturbation, Past Character Death, Post-Canon, Relationship Study, Sexual Confusion, Slice of Life, Suicide, Tarot References & Allusions, Trans Female Thorn (Caligula), Trauma, 物の哀れ
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-02
Updated: 2020-03-02
Packaged: 2021-02-27 21:29:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22642621
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuutsuhime/pseuds/yuutsuhime
Summary: Returned to reality, yet stuck with the same grief, heartbreak, and identity crisis that led her to Möbius; Thorn finds a friend in the former president of the Go-Home Club.
Relationships: Female Protagonist/Thorn, Saotome Ichika/Satake Shogo, Saotome Ichika/Thorn, Satake Shogo & Thorn
Series: Rose†Thorn [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2046104
Comments: 5
Kudos: 13





	Something That Wounds

**Author's Note:**

> This fic spoils most of the Caligula Effect, including the ending, Shogo's backstory, and Thorn's entire character.
> 
> The female protagonist has no canon name, so I called her Luca Hirano. I'm being wildly improvisational with the canon anyway; Thorn, the protagonist, and Ichika are essentially OCs built around what little information we know.

### VII.

In philosophy, Zeno's paradox describes a logical problem that arises when a task is repeatedly split into smaller tasks. For example: to walk from a beginning to an end, you must first walk halfway there; but, in order to get halfway there, you must first get a quarter of the way there; and before that, one eighth, _ad infinitum_. In order to get to the end, you must first complete an infinite number of subtasks, and that, Zeno claims, is impossible.

A list of applications of Zeno's paradox:

  * Thorn still has Shogo's high school e-mail saved on her old desktop computer. She could beg, if she really wanted to.

  * The space between Thorn and forgiving herself.

  * The distance from the observation deck on the Landmark Tower to the parking lot.

  * A fool's journey towards death; or, a gallows.

  * Whatever lives between denial and acceptance.




Thorn looks at the woman in her bathroom mirror and pretends. Dips her hands into infinity.

### VI.

Thorn finds a miniature garden on the roof of the Landmark Tower. It's a couple square meters of grass landscaped in with stone paths and four wooden benches with four dedications that Thorn doesn't bother to read.

She sits and watches a boy and a girl press their noses against the glass separating the roof from the sky. The tower was completed in 2004, so there must be a dozen years' worth of nose grease on the surface. The girl wears a blue helmet and a skirt and has a smudge of chocolate on her lip, framing the gap in her teeth when she laughs. She tells her father that she wants to fly all the way to the ocean like a kite.

The boy is impatient to go back home. He wears a t-shirt with a cartoon spaceship, the print peeling off from being washed too many times, sporting Pokémon-patterned bandages on both knees. He walks on the grass heedless of the signs.

The father is dark man with a tired expression, like Thorn, and a ragged beard, like Thorn. Definitely not like Ichika. The mother is more like Ichika because she isn't here, even though the mother probably wears yellow dresses and smiles up at everyone and Ichika didn't — Thorn is getting distracted now. The father is wearing an unbuttoned earth-tone flannel over a cheap gray polo, and has a mid-range professional camera hanging from a strap around his neck like a noose. He meets Thorn's eyes — a single glance enough for him to tell that Thorn is not also a father — and he turns away with a curt smile.

When they leave, Thorn approaches the glass and wonders which of the three she is most like. Would it be the boy, because she was also a boy once? Would it be the girl, because she too had dreamed of flight? Or would it be the father, since he also chose not to keep any pictures?

Thorn finds a girl in the reflection of the glass. Presses her nose, gently, to hers. The girl is Ichika, maybe, floating as a ghost in the space she left behind. Or maybe she's just Thorn, because Thorn doesn't look like Ichika anymore — or maybe she looks like ~~Asuka~~ , and ~~Asuka~~ was still a ~~man~~ even though ~~he~~ had a girl's name. Thorn isn't sure what that makes her.

Ichika always wore her skirts long. Black tights. Black leather. Red nails. Choker, if she didn't button her top all the way up (and sometimes even if she did, for the sake of spontaneity). She kept her hair parted on the left side, bangs over one eye for so long that her depth perception broke.

Thorn had held that in her own reflection, once. Now, if Thorn put her lips to the glass, it would just be a brief kiss.

### III.

Here's the anatomy of a fall:

1

| 

Thorn jumps off the elevated club stage at the Grand Guignol. Shogo screams " ~~Natsume~~ " and Lucid screams "Thorn", although now she isn't Lucid, the musician; she's just Luca Hirano, the girl. Luca made sense to Thorn because they could both peel back layers of themselves until all that was left were two girls in a coed bath, and they'd seep trauma from their bodies and allow it to mix before it swirled down the drain.  
  
---|---  
  
1/2

| 

Ninety percent of people who jump regret their decision halfway down. Thorn read the statistic on the Internet. It didn't make sense because everyone who could confirm they regretted it was still alive. Of course you'd regret jumping if you survived.

Eighty-five percent of people who attempt suicide by jumping die. It's probably because they jump from things that don't leave room for regret. They have a plan and stick to it, steeled by years of mental rehearsal and images of other people's ruptured organs. But sometimes it's impulsive; you have to jump from the closest thing available, and everything falls apart.

Like, if Thorn was going to kill herself for real, she should have gone to the Landmark Tower.

Maybe that's a regret.  
  
1/4

| 

Thorn studied math in school. She was good at it because numbers didn't care about how people felt. They didn't comfort you when you were wrong, but they didn't hurt you either.

In every fall, there's a beginning and an end. And between those two, there's two falls that last half as long. Four falls that last a quarter as long. Thorn can keep halving it down until there are infinitely many falls that last some amount of time, and maybe that means she'll never get to the last one.  
  
1/8

| 

This is Thorn's first real jump. All prior attempts on the fake Landmark Tower and inside of her fake brain didn't compare. She'd wake up at the end, or the limits of Möbius' virtual physics would fail her and she'd be left pleading against the asphalt, all her broken bones imaginary.  
  
1/16

| 

Here's how it was supposed to go:

  * Thorn would remember to take off her shoes. 
  * It would be cold, like that night. Thorn could catch snowflakes on her bare skin. There was no need to wear a coat. 
  * Thorn would fall the way Ichika did, find all the pieces she left along the way. _You saw this,_ Thorn would know. _You felt this._
  * Her body would explode across the pavement like a star. 



Instead, time condenses down; an asymptote of unpaired halves.  
  
* * *

Thorn wakes up in ~~Asuka Natsume's~~ childhood room. Her body is sore and the tatami mats are far more worn than she remembers. Möbius is over.

She laughs so hard she screams.

### 0.

Ichika Saotome is weird. She watches horror movies and listens to goth rock and she and Shogo fuck in the room next to Thorn's. Thorn hears everything, and she's supposed to be happy.

Instead, Thorn closes her eyes and imagines what Ichika's band t-shirts look like on the floor. Girls take their shirts off differently from guys. Shogo sort of wriggles his arms around and pulls himself into the shirt before he stretches it up over his head like a garbage bag. That's what Thorn used to do, before she saw Ichika take hers off, crossing her arms and grabbing from the bottom. It's more feminine that way. Graceful.

They weren't kids anymore. Weekends used to mean playing soccer in the abandoned lot across the street from Shogo's house until they were all covered in sand. At school, Shogo got put on the boys' team and Ichika went on the girls' team and Thorn sat on a stack of old tires and figured that teams weren't really her thing anyway.

Ichika braided Thorn's hair as a joke in the spring between elementary school and junior high. _You make a pretty girl,_ she'd said. Thorn laid back on the grass with her feet on the tire stack and thought about placement tests and moustache shadow and school dress codes and haircuts and everything else that was new and terrifying. Ichika finally gets the link cable to work on her GameBoy and trades Thorn a Scyther for a Vulpix.

Thorn turns 13 on September 9, 1998. It's a school day, but Shogo brings her a pack of Pokémon cards and a promise that he'd get Pokémon Silver if Thorn got Pokémon Gold. Ichika pouts about how there isn't a third game where she can play as a girl. They split a pack of mitarashi dango from the 7-Eleven on the way back from Bandobashi station and the clerk yells at Shogo to stay away from the adult magazines.

At home, Thorn's mother cooks yakisoba and Thorn gets a present in the mail from her father. It's a men's face razor. She puts it back in the box and forgets it on the top shelf of her closet. Ichika jokes that Thorn's _finally a real man_ and Thorn fumbles her smile somewhere behind her lips.

Thorn has her first drink at 14. They were back in the abandoned lot, a jungle of rusted cars and dirt paths worn around grass long enough to bear seeds. In the mornings the dew bled from the leaves and beaded on cold metal until it dripped. Late at night, the scene would drown in a sea of crickets, and Ichika would ask, _so, have you kissed a girl yet_ and Thorn would say _no_ and Shogo would say _yes_ and all three of them would drink out of the same bottle of Ichika's father's Texas whiskey and trace outlines through the same constellations.

Later that night they play strip poker in Ichika's room while her parents scream at each other in the kitchen. Thorn takes her shirt off, and notices her chest is flat and covered with acne and Ichika is already a B-cup. Shogo doesn't seem that upset to have his shirt off. They both have erections. Ichika wins, and Thorn jacks off in the bathroom while Ichika and Shogo make out against her rolled-up futon.

Thorn returns ten minutes later. Ichika puts on Rurouni Kenshin to cover the sound of her father watching porn in the family room to "calm down". _Wish they'd just finally split,_ Ichika says. She picks at the sides of her fingernails until they bleed and Thorn can tell Shogo doesn't know what to do either.

Pokémon Crystal comes out in late 2000, when Ichika is fifteen and sometimes sneaks Thorn and Shogo into grunge shows in downtown Yokohama. She's more content to sleep against Shogo's shoulder in a 24-hour McDonald's, waiting for the trains to restart at 5 in the morning, than continue playing a children's game.

 _Are you a boy or a girl?_ the game asks. Thorn blinks sleep from her eyes and wipes Big Mac grease onto her pants. She picks 'girl', just to see something different. Names herself 'Rose'.

When Shogo and Ichika finally fuck, it's at Thorn's house. Thorn's mother is out on a business trip to Osaka and Thorn's father doesn't live there anymore. They are drunk and Ichika's hands are everywhere on Shogo's body as she drags him away.

Shogo had everything. Confidence in his body. A girl who _liked_ his body. He trimmed his hair and his eyebrows and shaved his face and Thorn — Thorn didn't do anything because, well, her hair wouldn't be growing there if it wasn't supposed to _be_ there, right? She'd had the beard for long enough that it's too late to ask her dad how to use the razor she'd abandoned in the closet for two years. She might as well act like she wanted it.

When Shogo and Ichika fuck, Thorn presses her ear up against the wall and imagines how Ichika's breasts would fit against Shogo's chest. How she'd ride him like she knew what she wanted with her body, and he'd take it like he knew what he wanted with his.

Thorn listens to them moan, touches her own chest through her top and imagines what it would feel like if she was wearing Ichika's top and had Ichika's breasts. She could reach down and finger herself and she would get wet, like she was supposed to. If she were Ichika, then she wouldn't have to be here at all.

Instead, Thorn stays, and watches their relationship bloom. They grow into themselves like everyone does, and Thorn falls into her own body, scraping every edge on the way down.

### IV.

Luca Hirano is weird. She has short bleached hair and wears a loose, low-cut top tucked into high-waisted pants like some sort of paradoxically functional adult delinquent. Twenty-three in real life. Dropped out of college and works five days a week at the JR Shin-Yokohama terminal printing Shinkansen tickets for verbally abusive businessmen.

Thorn is thirty in real life. She still lives in her mother's house, sleeps on a fifteen-year old futon, and uploads electronic music to Niconico sometimes. That's where the whole Thorn thing started. Vocaloid was powerful enough to synthesize female voices for her tracks, and nobody knew who she really was, so she picked a sharp noun for a name and let people make assumptions. Picking Ichika Saotome would have been too conspicuous.

Thorn has one unread message from Luca: "Please tell me you got home safe."

"Yes." Thorn replies.

"I'm glad. I still want to be your friend. This isn't forgiveness but I care about you as a person and I want you to know that if you ask I will be there."

### I.

Ichika kills herself on February 14, 2003. Shogo is too afraid to stop her.

Thorn doesn't go to the funeral.

The last time Thorn sees Shogo, he is crying and bloody and bruised and Thorn slams his head against the road over and over. _Why didn't you stop her?_ she screams. _Why! Why! Why!_

Shogo vomits blood at the end, and doesn't call the police. He locks himself in his house for the next thirteen years.

So does Thorn.

### V.

Thorn doesn't leave her mother's house for a week after she returns from virtual reality. She can't remember when her mother's hair turned gray or when all of her clothes became frayed. Her wardrobe consists of just gray sweatpants, boxer shorts, and oversized t-shirts.

The razor is still on the top shelf of her closet.

A list of days:

  1. Thorn eats at the kitchen table. Her mother cries, and Thorn is confused. "I can't remember the last time we ate together," she says. Thorn swallows the lump in her throat and washes it down with green tea.

  2. Thorn's mother struggles to lift the garage door as she carries a basket of groceries from the car. Thorn holds the door up. Her mother is sixty-three and has a bad hip. She fell in 2010 and Thorn can't remember.

  3. Thorn learns that her father died in 2013. His heart failed. Thorn can't remember.

  4. Thorn checks her gaming computer. 10,626 hours logged on Möbius. Servers offline. She pauses for a moment, then uninstalls the application.

  5. Thorn unpackages the razor and shaves most of her beard off. She isn't really sure if it's safe to use a face razor on body hair, so she uses scissors instead. It's unwieldy and she only gets about half of the length of the hair, but it's something.

  6. Thorn helps her mother wash the dishes after dinner. Her mother holds Thorn's face in both hands and tells her, "I feel like my ~~son~~ is finally back."

"How long has it been?" Thorn chokes out.

"I don't know if you've truly been here since Ichika died. You never wanted to talk about it."

"I-I... I'm sorry," Thorn says. She hasn't apologized in years and it tastes bitter and sharp on her tongue.

"You're my ~~son~~ ," her mom says, "and I love you."

"I love you too."

  7. Thorn cries into the futon in her room while her mother strokes a hand through her greasy hair. Gently. Like she was still a child.




* * *

Thorn leaves the house eight days after Möbius ends. There's a new duplex built on the abandoned lot, and the ticket machine at Bandobashi station has been replaced with a new electronic card reader. She rides the Blue Line north to Shin-Yokohama terminal and waits.

Luca gets off work at 6:00 and doesn't recognize Thorn until Thorn waves.

"Hi," Luca says.

"Hi," Thorn says.

They get ramen at a shop in the tunnels below the tracks. Trains rumble overhead and Thorn isn't sure what to talk about.

"You can wear whatever you want next time, you know," Luca says.

"I don't have anything else."

"I have a bag of old clothes that I'm never got rid of. I used to try to be super femme, but that just wasn't my style. You're welcome to take those."

"Oh," Thorn says.

Later, they file out of the station with the rest of the commuters, past the taxis and the skyscrapers and down to the waterfront. The night sky glows a soft blue from the light pollution, but the waterfront is calm, and reflections dance across the surface like fireflies.

"So, do we talk about it?" Luca says.

"Go ahead."

"I know you've spent years trying to ruin Shogo's life. Guilt tripping him over something he couldn't control."

Thorn's heart sinks into her gut like a spade. "He _could_ control it."

"No. Shogo is my friend, but even if that weren't the case, the way you treated him is _not_ okay. It is _not_ his fault, Thorn."

Thorn startles at her name, unsure why she deserves to be called it.

"Abuse in the real world is abuse. And abuse in virtual reality is _still_ abuse," Luca says. "And I need to say it. If I'm going to be here in real life for you I need to say this out loud."

"It doesn't help now."

"I'm saying this for _myself_ , as someone who won't just pretend to _forget_ the fucking _shit_ you did in Möbius. Don't mistake this as me doing a service for you, or trying to fix all your problems, because I'm not, and frankly, that shouldn't be anyone's job but your own." Luca pauses, and Thorn says nothing, so she continues, "It seems like you view people as either helpful to you, or not helpful to you, and you don't even consider that other people can do things that are helpful for themselves."

"So I'm selfish piece of shit."

"Don't twist what I'm saying into your own self-hatred."

"I'm aware of what's wrong with me."

"Are you? Because it seems like you don't consider how other people feel, and how your behavior impacts them, at _all_."

"I'm going."

"Is that a suicide threat?"

Thorn stands. "What I do is none of your business. It's not something you should care about."

"Do you even know how I feel?"

"No."

"Can you imagine? Can you at least fucking _try_?"

Thorn lets out an exasperated breath. "You feel angry because my friendship with you was a farce to try to manipulate you away from ending Möbius."

"I do."

"You feel used, and hurt, and disappointed because you found out what I do to people. And you should. It's the truth."

Luca pauses. "Were there others besides Shogo?"

"I mean, in Möbius —"

"In the real world, Thorn. What did you do?"

"I told him it was his fault," Thorn spits. "I screamed it, and I said everything I needed to say."

"He told me that you accused him of...of _raping_ her. He said you told everyone that their relationship was abusive and that he beat her and he drove her to suicide. Was that the truth?"

"I lied to destroy him. On purpose. Is that what you want to hear?"

"Did you want _him_ to kill himself, too?"

"Oh, I _wished_ he had died. He was the one who dated Ichika. He was the closest — he was the one Ichika fucking planned a pair suicide with. I wasn't."

"When you attacked Shogo and stomped on his head, were you _trying_ to murder him?"

Thorn stops. " _I don't know_ , but—"

"Even though you relented, you had already succeeded in ruining his life. Out of what, jealousy?"

"Yes."

"And you manipulated the people around you in Möbius to keep hurting him, right? Myself included?"

"I did."

Luca is quiet. Watches the waves flutter down the river like thoughts.

Thorn asks, "Why do you bother with me?"

"Because I understand," Luca says. Her voice is calmer now, wavering.

"How can you understand anything about me? I only ever pretended to... to be _her_. There never even was a _me_."

Luca stops. "I... I don't know how to ask this, except to be blunt. But... _you_ are a woman, right?"

Thorn can't think of a response, and a thousand sentences die in breaths in the back of her throat.

Luca takes a deep breath, probably to calm herself. Breathes out for longer than she breathes in. "I understand because I never fucking knew who I was. And I hurt people, too."

Both of them are quiet, and the scene is so still and frictionless that Thorn could blow a ship across the harbor with just a breath.

"I have to go," Luca says, and Thorn doesn't stop her.

### II.

Thorn is in Möbius. She realizes it's a fake world immediately, when she looks in the mirror and sees herself as Ichika. It's too perfect.

Thorn is wearing a school uniform in the same way that Ichika did. Her skirt is long and flowing, with black tights underneath, the top buttoned to the throat.

"Ichika," she says into the mirror. Her voice is light and effortlessly feminine. Ichika's eyes widen in the mirror, as if she is also surprised to see herself.

Thorn spins, and her skirt flows out around the knees. Thorn has never worn a skirt before. Her heart is pounding.

She's — she's not supposed to be thinking this way about Ichika. Ichika was a person, not a sex object, and Thorn _knows_ this. This is just a fantasy, but it's too perfect a fantasy, too real, and well, Thorn would be lying if she said she didn't want this. Möbius granted — simulated — your deepest wish. No judgment.

So Thorn does it. Runs her hands over her chest and gasps. Ichika's gasps. Ichika's chest. Too perfect, but she ignores it, and unbuttons the top, trembling. Thorn has cleavage. She stares at her reflection, a shameful blush spreading across her face; she is panting, breathless. Feels herself getting wet. She has never felt that before, only wished, and it's more intense than anything she could have imagined.

She could dream this forever, if she had the choice.

### VIII.

Denial goes both ways. You can deny how you feel, or you can accept how you feel, and deny anything that stands against it.
    
    
    From: Thorn (roseXthorn@gmail.co.jp)
    Subject: Ichika
    Date: April 15, 2016 2:15:42 AM JST
    To: satak023@ysd.jp
    
    Shogo,
    
    For the past thirteen years, I blamed you for what happened to Ichika. I tried to destroy you on purpose.
    
    You are not wrong to feel the way you do about me. I was your other best friend. We should have grieved together.
    
    I am not asking for anything. The past is what happened, and nobody can change that. Even so, what happened was not your fault. You didn't deserve anything I did. I was wrong.
    
    I hope you can move on some day.
    
    I'm truly sorry.
    
    ~~Asuka Natsume~~ (Thorn)
    

Thorn cries in the bathroom; ugly, snot running into fistfuls of toilet paper. Her voice echoes into the basin of the pit toilet and comes back tainted with shit, nowhere left to go but back inside her.

### X.

It rains after Luca leaves work. Thorn buys a bento from the Kiosk on the eastbound platform of the Shin-Yokohama station while Luca microwaves the last half of a frozen gyu-don in the staff lounge. The station gleams fluorescent in puddles of water, trampled across the white interior by muddy footprints. Thorn sits on a bench under an AKB-48 poster and watches men in suits shake water off transparent umbrellas onto each other.

"How are you," Luca says, sitting next to Thorn.

"I'm fine."

They sit and watch as suitcases flow like water through the turnstiles. A chorus of acceptance comes from the card readers at the Blue Line platform, just as the arrival of the 6:05 Nozomi Shinkansen for Tokyo is announced.

"I'm sorry," Thorn says.

Luca struggles to bite a piece of beef in half. "For what?"

"Using you."

"It's cool," Luca says.

The 6:09 Nozomi bound for Hiroshima arrives at the platform. Thorn spits the tail of her shrimp into an empty part of her bento box and turns to Luca.

"Why do you treat me like this?" Thorn says.

"Like what?"

"Like I'm worth anything as a friend."

"I dunno. Don't really need a reason to care about a person. Sometimes, you just do."

"But I don't deserve—"

"Don't," Luca says.

"You know what I did. Aren't you scared of that?"

"What, apologizing to the people you hurt? Reflecting on yourself? Shogo talked to me, you know."

"No, before that. Everything. I'm still the same person who—"

"And that makes you undeserving of compassion?"

"Yes."

Luca turns her eyes down to her bowl and chases a green bean around with her chopsticks. The 6:15 Nozomi bound for Tokyo arrives at the platform.

"How do you think I feel," Luca says, and Thorn can taste the hurt in her voice. "Do you think I'm undeserving of compassion because I was a fucking school bully? I'm still the same person, too."

"That's different," Thorn says.

"I didn't stop until a girl killed herself."

The 6:16 Kodama bound for Nagoya arrives at the platform.

"You're important to me," Thorn says. "I'm just not sure whether the person you care about is actually me. Because I was pretending to be Ichika. I don't know if you know who I really am. And honestly, I don't either."

"You're more transparent than you think," Luca says.

The 6:19 Nozomi bound for Okayama arrives at the platform.

"You're wrong," Thorn says. "I'm nothing."

"Well, now I do feel like I'm throwing all of my compassion in a hole."

"You are."

Luca stands up. "Okay. I'm not a therapist, Thorn. You can't ask me to feel _nothing_ when you talk about yourself this way, and won't listen."

"You're not going to _fix_ me, Luca."

Luca stops, eyes watering. "Do you remember in Möbius, when you asked me to die with you?"

"That was just Ichika."

"No, Thorn. That was you. And I said yes because even though I've thought that irredeemable piece of shit people like me deserve to die, I didn't want _you_ to die, and I thought that maybe, if I was there, you wouldn't have to be alone. Maybe it's easier for me to care about someone else instead of myself. But maybe that was just the moment where I finally let myself fall in love with you."

Luca throws her garbage in a trash can and walks into the rain, fading into twilight without an umbrella. The 6:22 Hikari bound for Tokyo arrives at the platform. Her words hang in the air of the station, awkward and far too honest, fading into petrichor and strangers' overlapping conversations. Thorn thinks about things in the station that could break, if she let it. Lists every train that had arrived with a greeting and left without a goodbye.

### IX.
    
    
    From: Satake Shogo (satake.shogo@gmail.co.jp)
    Subject: Re: Fwd: Ichika
    Date: April 17, 2016 6:44:36 PM JST
    To: roseXthorn@gmail.co.jp
    
    It may surprise you, but my ability to move on doesn't require your apology or goodwill. You may consider all our loose ends resolved. There is no use dwelling on such pain.
    
    It's my belief that no person is uniformly 'bad', or 'good'. People grow, and perhaps find some sort of solace. However, I am not capable of giving a friendship with you a second chance. I ask that you respect that.
    
    I wish you the best,
    Shogo
    

### XI.

Thorn stops at the FamilyMart across the street from Bandobashi station by her mother's house. She buys a pack of three women's leg razors, an aerosol can of shaving cream, twelve hair clips, and a black liquid eyeliner. Her hair is messy from rain and her shirt is soaked through. She pays in cash.

In the shower, Thorn sits on the wooden stool the family has sat on for the last thirty years and finally learns what her bare legs look like as an adult. Hair fills the drain net and she has to wipe it out with toilet paper. She's bleeding from somewhere under her kneecap and her fingers are wrinkled — it's probably been an hour already.

She does her chest and stomach next. Flips her beard trimmer upside down and cuts her pubic hair into the pit toilet. Learns basic eyeliner from a video on Niconico. She leaves a thumbs-up.

Specks of spit from dental floss litter the bathroom mirror, but Thorn uses it anyway. Combs her hair over one eye. She's surprised that it's long enough to reach her cheek when it's clean.

"Hey," she says, and the reflection smiles back.

### XII.

Luca doesn't expect to see Thorn at the station, and she wavers like a cornered animal.

"What," she says.

"I need to be honest."

"Then be honest."

"I-I guess I feel the same way about you, that you feel about me. I mean, about deserving compassion. I invalidated you and blocked you out and I'm sorry. I'm going to work on it."

"Okay."

Thorn pauses. "You're... you're the only person who still calls me Thorn."

"Is that okay?"

"Yeah," Thorn says. "And... I think ~~Asuka~~ is just the old version of me. Like, ~~he's~~ the one who did all that shit, and ~~he's~~ the one who's hurting the most, and ~~he's~~ the one I hate when I hate myself."

"What do you mean? You've still got the same life. You can't just say someone else did all the shit and start fresh."

"I know. I mean I'm ready to be Thorn. On the outside."

"So—"

"I think I'm trans," Thorn says. She doesn't realize she's holding her breath until she finishes speaking.

Luca relaxes. Smiles a bit. Thorn is also smiling a bit. "Is it weird to say I totally guessed it?"

"How?"

"I mean, this is what I meant when I said I understood you, and that you were totally transparent."

"But what—"

"Like, someone who grieves for someone else doesn't just _become_ them. Even in virtual reality, that's like, a big leap. Nobody who's actually a man would just _become_ a girl and be okay with it."

"I just wanted to be _with_ her," Thorn says.

"So you _became_ her?"

"I don't know, what if I'm not actually transgender, and I just _want_ to be, so that I _can_ transition?"

"Thorn, what the _fuck_ are you talking about? That's the transest shit I've ever heard."

"Really?"

"Yeah, really. Can I... Can I give you a hug, or—"

Thorn falls against Luca. Hugs so hard that Thorn feels like she'll burst like a tube of toothpaste.

"Thanks," Thorn says. "For sticking with me."

"I gotcha."

"I don't know if I'll get out of the shit for a while."

"That's okay. As long as you keep at it."

"Okay. I'm there for you too, if you need it," Thorn says. She means it.

* * *

Luca's apartment is within walking distance of the Blue Line stop at Sakuragicho. Thorn stops at a Kiosk and buys a package of mitarashi dango and a pickled plum onigiri.

"Feels like a birthday," Thorn says.

"It can be," Luca says. "But don't you want to wait until 4/20?"

"April 19th is fine, too."

"But it's _so_ close," Luca whines.

Luca lives in a studio apartment on the fourth floor. The view from the window is just the other side of the building and the sink is full of unwashed pots and pans. She has a rainbow flag on the wall, and another flag that Thorn doesn't recognize.

"Sorry about this," Luca says. "That bag of clothes is everything you can just _have_ , but honestly you can wear anything in the house."

Thorn eats her onigiri and they split the pack of dango. Luca chews on the sticks and probably swallows some wood. It's cute.

"So, um," Thorn says.

"My bedroom's over there," Luca says.

Thorn's heart skips a beat. "What?"

"You want to try on clothes, right? You can shut the door, I trust you well enough. Just... don't go exploring in any of the boxes in the closet. But honestly, everything else is fair game. You can wear my fucking lingerie for all I care. Just put it in the hamper if you take it off."

Thorn nods. She probably shouldn't be blushing.

Behind the locked bedroom door, Thorn's hands are still shaking. She moves the clothes around in the closet as if every touch could disintegrate them, or worse, as if every touch would corrupt the femininity of the clothes with Thorn's ~~male~~ body. The door to the closet is a floor to ceiling mirror and it's not helping.

Deep breath. In, and out. Longer on the out.

Thorn strips her sweat pants and boxers. Takes her shirt off the feminine way. Puts her makeup on the confused, Niconico way. Wishes she remembered a razor so she could go back over her chin again.

There's a few pairs of white panties in the paper bag. These are the things Thorn doesn't have to give back. So it doesn't matter if her dick touches them, right?

There's also a bralette in the bag. 36A. That's definitely not Luca's cup size, and now Thorn is starting to get suspicious. She puts it on and it pinches her ribcage. Maybe it's supposed to fit like that? Thorn doesn't know. In Möbius all the bras she had fit Ichika's body from the start, but that was probably just another unrealistic part of virtual reality.

She sees her reflection and her eyes go wide. She, well... she definitely doesn't look like a man. She isn't sure when she learned to call herself a ~~queer~~ or a ~~faggot~~ but that's definitely happening, and _oh, god_ , is Thorn getting turned on? Why is Thorn getting turned on? This is definitely the wrong time for that, and, well, _shit_ , this better not just be a _fetish_ or something—

She keeps going. There's several dresses in the bag, with a few skirts. Most of the dresses don't fit over Thorn's shoulders or don't zip up around her ribcage. One is a yellow halter dress that makes Thorn look like a ray of sunshine. It's incredibly confusing and not at all her color. She takes it off.

Wine red might be better. Ichika would have preferred black, but Luca seems to have kept everything black for herself. Because Thorn was Ichika in Möbius, she doesn't really have a basis for what parts of femininity looks good on her actual body.

The cut of the wine red dress goes down past Thorn's bra and the fabric is a too thin to hide her bulge when she's standing, but, well... she feels kind of good. The dress flows out when she spins in it, and soon she's giggling to herself like a little girl, even though her heart is still pounding.

"Thorn," Thorn says to her reflection. The dress makes her look like a rose. Thorn smiles back.

* * *

"Hi," Thorn says.

"Hi — oh my god? Thorn?"

"Yeah," Thorn says. Her voice is quiet, shy. "This is me."

"Wow, you're hot," Luca says, and catches herself. "I-I mean, you know, you look good. You look... really good. Sorry."

Thorn wants to ask if Luca means it, but she falls back on trust.

"You know, the other day, when you said that..." Thorn stutters.

"When I said what?"

Thorn becomes aware of how close they are standing.

"Do we talk about it?" Thorn says.

Luca smirks. She definitely gets it. "Sometimes," she says, "you can just go for it."

Thorn looks into Luca's eyes. Maybe a kiss is like a fall.

1

| 

"Okay," Thorn says. Whispers.  
  
---|---  
  
1/2

| 

Ninety percent of people who jump regret their decision halfway down.  
  
1/4

| 

In every kiss, there's a beginning and an end. Between those, two kisses that last half as long. Four kisses that last a quarter as long. An infinity of kisses, each lasting no time at all.  
  
1/8

| 

This is Thorn's first real kiss. Everything before was just imagination.  
  
0

| 

Thorn can't think of any other way it should be.  
  
### XIII.

Thorn visits Ichika's grave. She's buried across from her great-grandparents, in a tiny cemetery behind a Shinto shrine that kids used to shelter in whenever it got rainy on the way back from elementary school.

Thorn is wearing a neutral pair of jeans and a button-up — both women's fits, but still plausibly deniable. She hasn't officially told anyone besides Luca yet, but some people can probably guess.

At breakfast Thorn watched the NHK news and ate her mother's vegetable scrambled eggs and mentioned, offhand, how she'd always liked it when people called her by her musician's name online.

"Oh, Thorn?" her mother had said. "Well, I picked the name ~~Asuka~~ , but you're more than welcome to change it. Whoever you become, you'll still be my child."

Thorn had peered into her mother's eyes, searching for a crease or a sparkle that wasn't usually there. _Child_ , she'd said. Not _~~son~~_.

Thorn leaves a rose on Ichika's grave.

"Thought you'd like this," Thorn says, to nobody in particular. She breathes in the smell of incense and the rustle of the trees and tries to ignore the sounds of traffic.

"I know I've been apologizing to a lot of people, but I need to say sorry to you, too... I'm not you. Nobody can be you except you. I'm sorry for taking that away. I just... I just I miss you so fucking much."

Thorn is choking on her own throat again. Crying, like it's the first day Ichika was dead all over again, although Thorn never cried back then. Just another mistake in a lifetime of mistakes.

"I'm gonna be me now, okay? Thanks for... for everything. Ichika."

When Thorn turns away, she thinks about falling and asphalt and apologies and every train that has come and gone. How she can approach a goodbye but never truly reach it. How she was going to be dead next year for thirteen years, and wasn't, and maybe she didn't regret that. How maybe her story could be the one where the trans girl doesn't kill herself at the end. She knows her name, now. So she doesn't look back.

**Author's Note:**

> The Caligula Effect canon is extremely transmisogynistic and upsetting. Just let this be an FYI to people who become interested in the game as a result of my trans fanfic. Thorn kills herself at the end of the game, after being brutally outed.
> 
> This may be author TMI, but I pretty obviously struggle with the same problems Thorn does. Grief, unrequited love, identity issues, dissociation from reality, and, well... kind of being a shit person to people around me as a result of uncontrolled mental illness. I want to see stories where people like me don't kill themselves at the end because I want to believe recovery is possible, even if it's not beautiful or complete.
> 
> For those of you coming from Persona or Tarot, this whole story is a fool's journey. The chapters are numbered in chronological order from 0 to 13, and each chapter reflects the corresponding arcana. Some significant ones:
> 
>   * 0 (the fool): The beginning, but Thorn is also a fool because she doesn't realize she's a girl. 
>   * 2 (the high priestess): Represents the divine feminine, which Thorn experiences. 
>   * 7 (the chariot): Representing motion; also Zeno's paradox is the vehicle by which change is contextualized in the story. 
>   * 12 (the hanged man): Represents letting go, or new perspectives, which Thorn gains by taking transitional action. It's also a play on the name of the arcana, because Thorn metaphorically hangs her former gender. 
>   * 13 (death): Ichika is dead, but arcana 13 also represents transition, which Thorn has accepted. 
> 

> 
> Other interesting tidbits:
> 
>   * The central theme of this story is "every rose has its thorn" but I deliberately never say that exact phrase. 
>   * Yes, I'm insinuating that Luca is a stealth transfemme. 
>   * The JR timetable in chapter 10 should be correct. 
>   * General locations of convenience stores and rail lines in Yokohama should also be correct. 
>   * Ichika kills herself on Valentine's day. 
>   * Thorn's birthday is September 9, 1985 based on her canon age and the game's release date. 
> 



End file.
